


Regularly Reincarnated

by RayByAnotherName



Series: Regularly Reincarnated [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26445667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RayByAnotherName/pseuds/RayByAnotherName
Summary: What if The Old Guard wasn't immortal, they were just reincarnated constantly, with their memories intact.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Regularly Reincarnated [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2066181
Comments: 10
Kudos: 137





	Regularly Reincarnated

Andy can’t remember her first life anymore. There’s been too many by this point. She’s certain that memory is finite and that forgetting is actually a blessing. You cannot miss those you cannot remember.

It is the small dagger she remembers. A small blade pressed into her palm. Andy remembers the dummy made of straw she practiced on. It was the first time she learned to fight, a small child who would grow to fight in every life after. Andy isn’t certain which life the memory is from. Somedays she hopes it was her first, so she can say she still has a piece of it with her. Other days… other days she hopes that first life, at least, she had known peace.

She can’t remember who gave her the blade.

Her first axe, that one Andy remembers well. She’d been born in the North that time. Spent a lot of time shivering by a fire. The rest she spent with a shield on her arm and an axe in her hand. Every life after, she seeks out axes and maces, top heavy weapons that she twirls in her hands with ease. After hundreds of lives, it’s as easy as breathing.

-.-.-

Quynh ignores her past lives, for the most part. Each life is different. Each one unique. She tries to focus on the one she is living, not the ones in which she is already died.

It works better when she is born farther away from where she dies, farther away from those who are still grieving and who, in her youth, she may be naive enough to seek out.

Once she finds Andromache - on life number 5? Or was it 7? - it becomes more bearable. They seek each other out, naming locations to meet at before they die. The memories are always clearer when they are together, the smiles merge, and it almost feels like a long, singular life rather than so many short ones.

When they are separated. When she is thrown into the sea and sunk in that- When they are separated, Quynh let’s herself forget the memories for a few lives. The next time she sees Andromache, she’s going by Andy and her eyes no longer dance with the light of her many lives.

Still, Quynh found her in the place they’d chosen. Even so many lives later.

“For you, I let myself remember,” Quynh tells Andy when the other woman asks why she came this time. Andy blushes, and a little bit of light seeps into her eyes.

-.-.-

Lykon skipped a whole millenia, possibly two. Life after life he’d found himself again by finding Andromache and Quynh. And then one life ends and he… he waits, in an eternal ether. He can see them, watch them.

It feels like minutes, but he watches them grow from child to adult dozens of times. And then one day he feels a tug.

“He’s beautiful, James, isn’t he?”

There’s a hesitant smile, almost nervous, on the face of the man hovering above him. “Hi there, Lykon. We’ve been waiting a long time for you.

-.-.-

Joe remembers being Yusuf and Giuseppe and Beppe and Jose. They’d been good lives, happy lives. Well, most of them. He tried not to remember the ones filled with too much death, though those memories were always the strongest.

Nicky was only every Nicky - whether his parents named him Nicolo or Nicholas or Niklaus or just plain Nick - and he’d grown accustomed to hearing it in a laugh. Whether it was Yusuf’s deep chuckle, or Jose’s youthful giggle. Joe always had a smile on his face the first time they met in their new lives. Always.

That’s not necessarily a good thing, given that they’ve met on so many battlefields. Not always on the same times. Especially those first few lives.

"We are destined, it seems, to kill one another once more.” Nicky raised a blade for the third life in a row.

Yusuf dropped his and chuckled, “No, Nicky. I don’t believe our God so cruel.” He raises his hands in the air. Nicky blinks.

In the next moment, they’re both dead anyway. But it’s the last time they raise weapons *against* each other. Side by side they fight, and they love, in every life. Fate continues to throw them together.

“Eh, Nicky!” Joe cheers as he claps Nicky on the shoulder as they meet on a street corner.

They’re still young - Joe hasn’t manage to grow his preferred beard yet - and this life has yet to throw them into battle. They can walk along a street, holding hands, and Nicky can stare up into Joe’s brown eyes as much as his heart desires. Which right now is constantly as Joe happily looks back him with reverence in his eyes

“You’re going to make me blush,” Nicky teases as Joe kisses Nicky’s cheek and nuzzles his nose into the soft bristly hair that Nicky is attempting to grow out. “You look at me as if you are staring into the sun, my love.”

“You are my sun,” Nicky grins at Joe’s word, “I am powerless under your pull.” Nicky pulls Joe closer and their lips meet in a soft kiss.

-.-.-

Booker hates this cycle. He wishes and prays for each life to be his last. It is in his third life that he meets another. Andy has lived hundreds of lives.

“Will it ever stop?” Booker asks in desperation. He can not face living like this, to live constantly, over and over again with memories piling on and on until he will inevitably forget those things he once loved.

“I don’t know,” Andy shrugs and pats his shoulder. Booker ends his own life for the first time the next day. It doesn’t take. In the next moment he is swaddled in a blanket and crying against the chest of a woman he will fear to love as his mother.

-.-.-

Nile grows up with her brother and the memories of another woman in her head. She thinks they’re a story, a character, and she spends hours in the library researching in an attempt to write her story accurately.

It disturbs her to find that the story is already accurate. The history of the time slots in around the story with ease and Nile shivers at the realization that she knows another’s story so intimately, so instinctively.

“Well, maybe you were her in a past life!” Her brother Layne jokes. It’s not so funny when they realize it might be true.


End file.
